[1] And this deed is very ugly indeed. There are twelve so-called honour killings every year in the UK, most shockingly brutal. And the news that a sixteen-year-old Turkish girl was buried alive for talking to boys, or that a Saudi Arabian woman was killed by her father for chatting to men on Facebook, are only the most publicised examples of a distressingly widespread tendency in some Islamic countries.
[2] In the Western world, many of our ideas about honour, and this aristocratic side, have come down from the age of chivalry. We may caricature the knight in shining armour, but the knight’s honour code was a powerful creation that had enormous influence for half a millennium. By the end of the Middle Ages, though, pragmatic power politics was taking the place of the chivalric code, and a new sense of individual freedom made the honour code seem restrictive or obsessive, as Shakespeare brilliantly shows in the character of Hotspur in Henry IV. Those chivalric idealists who lamented its passing were increasingly portrayed as naive dreamers, such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or heroic failures like Corneille’s El Cid, or were swept away as reactionary throwbacks, like the cavaliers of the English Civil War.
Yet as the world moved on, centuries later, the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of massive, turbulent cities revived the feeling that something important had been lost. Was the cold, hard reason of the head really preferable to the warm truth of the heart? Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) and other novels opened a deep vein of nostalgia for the bygone age of honour that ran through a Victorian age also fascinated by tales of the noble King Arthur and his knights. In his book, The Broad-Stone of Honour (1822), Kenelm Henry Digby insisted that: ‘Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world.’ His book inspired a new generation of conservatives, and helped to ensure that the schools of the rich, from English public schools to the private schools of the USA, still celebrate a reactionary honour code and an obsession with heraldry.
In time, nostalgia for ‘days of yore’ seemed childish, lampooned in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and was treated as fodder for countless tongue-in-cheek Hollywood movies. And yet it just won’t go away. Nearly every adventure movie, from Star Wars and Lord of the Rings to The Matrix, owes something to the chivalric code of honour.
[3] Here, interestingly, Schopenhauer is using even the word fame in a much more positive sense than we use it now. It is being well-known, not in our sense of being known by a lot of people, but known widely as admirable.
[4] Of course, it is not coincidence that people often talk of ‘men of honour’ but rarely ‘women of honour’ (except in the telling title ‘maids of honour’). A woman’s honour, in many honour codes, lay solely in her ability to protect her virginity ready for its rightful owner, her husband-to-be. And it was the knight’s (or her family’s) duty to make sure that she received this protection. The chivalric code of honour is inherently chauvinistic and aristocratic, and this is why the whole idea of honour seems deeply suspicious and reactionary, especially when tied in with all its ugly sides, from gang warfare to honour killings.
#44 Epic Poetry
Everyone loves a hero, and heroes don’t come bigger than the heroes of epic poetry. The heroes of epics didn’t just save a cat from a tree, or even rescue an old lady from a burning building. Their heroics were on a grand scale, and on their great deeds turned the fate of cities and empires, and even of all humanity itself. That’s what makes them so uplifting; they remind us that one man’s actions and his moral as well as physical courage matter, even on such a big canvas.
Today, few people but scholars read the great epic poems of the past – such as Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid and Milton’s Paradise Lost – but they inspired countless people through the ages, and they still have a certain resonance. Faint echoes of them are plain, too, in the adventure and fantasy films and stories of today. The Star Wars films and the Lord of the Rings trilogy may be childish next to Homer, but the deeds of Luke Skywalker, Frodo and Aragon clearly owe much to the epics of old, and can inspire some of the same thrill that people must have felt in ancient times when they listened to the bards recite their epic poems.
That’s of course how epic poetry began. It was an oral tradition. None of the first epic poems were written down. Instead, they were learned and handed down orally from one bard to another for generation after generation. Occasionally, the bard learned the whole poem by heart. More often, it seems, he simply knew the basic storyline – the key events and characters, the meetings and partings, the victories and defeats, the settings and the images. Then, armed with a few stock phrases and a prodigious skill for improvisation, he made it up as he went along, blending old and new, never telling the story quite the same way twice, adapting it each time to suit his audience. All the same, memorable phrases must have stuck in the mind and been passed down through the ages, and the poem must have become more and more refined and distilled with each telling.
Of course, much of this ancient oral epic poetry has been lost. But in the last two centuries, academic researchers have collected a wealth of stories from remote peoples living in Siberia and Central Asia, with some great stories, for instance, coming from the Kara-Kirgiz people of the Tien Shan mountains and the Yakut of northern Siberia. This research confirmed that huge and elaborate epic poems could be composed and even remembered orally. In the 1930s, American scholar Milman Parry transcribed an epic poem of 12,000 lines, the length of Homer’s Odyssey, from an illiterate Serbian bard.
The chances are that every culture in Europe and Eurasia had its own oral tradition of epic poetry.[1] Epic poems probably played a key role in defining and uniting each culture. They gave each their own special hero, their own unique bond and inspiration. Even today, so far into the modern age, the heroes of ancient myth – from Hercules and Achilles to King Arthur and Robin Hood – have a rich resonance. How much more power they would have had in a time when there were few other ways in which a culture could express its aspirations, when there was nothing else to fill the dark nights by the fire but the sound of the poet’s voice and nothing to distract the imagination from taking flight within the story. They had the power to ennoble a culture and create a sense of moral purpose and energy.
What is extraordinary about what we know of epic poetry is how high it aimed. Aristotle regarded epic poetry as the greatest form of literature except for tragedy. Renaissance scholars placed it even higher. Each poem was an astonishing feat of literary creation. The story had to be told on the grandest scale, using the most elaborate imagery, the most intricate and carefully crafted words, and embody the highest ideals and the most profound ideas. You could say it was pretentious, and anybody trying to imitate it today is in danger of being skewered for pseudery. But that was only because its intentions were so lofty. Artistically, intellectually, morally, spiritually, it was intended to give us something to aspire to – something to encourage each of us to be the best and fulfil our potential, to rise above the mundane.
The high aims and achievements of epic poetry are borne out magnificently in one of the first actually written down, Homer’s Iliad. This great poem tells of the events during the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of the city of Troy and the quarrel between Achilles and King Agamemnon. It dates from the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries BC, and along with the Odyssey, also attributed to Homer, it is the oldest known work of European literature. And what a work it is. In 15,700 lines of stirring verse, Homer tells a tale that has been described as one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written, full of rich imagery, powerful storytelling and high drama.
Some scholars think Homer was the name of the writer and creator of the Iliad. Others think there was no such person as Homer, and the poems were handed down orally from bard to bard until they were finally written down. In the 1920s, the scholar Parry showed clearly how the Ili
ad and Odyssey both use stock phrases and verses and even storylines that place it in the same oral tradition as the ancient Sumerian epic Gilgamesh.
Whatever the origins of Homer’s great poems, they set the benchmark for countless imitators since then. Sometimes, a poet even chooses the same subject matter, the siege of Troy, as did the Roman poet Virgil for his Aeneid, which is perhaps the greatest of all Roman literary works. Other poets create their own subject matter, picking up mythical stories as did Edmund Spenser for The Faerie Queene, or Biblical tales like Milton for his monumental Paradise Lost.
But the model is clear. Scholars have tried to pin down just what it is that makes an epic, and list a number of common features. An epic is a long narrative poem on a serious subject telling the tale of a larger-than-life hero. The setting is on a grand scale, with the hero often journeying the whole world. Typically, the hero is an outcast of some kind or a victim of the gods’ ire. But the fate of a nation or a people depends on his heroic fortitude in responding to his lot.
In keeping with the oral tradition and the pyrotechnic displays of the performing bard, there are all kinds of literary devices. It’s all on a grand scale, and there are no half measures, even in similes. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles doesn’t just run after Hector like a hound, he chases him ‘nonstop as a hound in the mountains starts a fawn from its lair, hunting him down the gorges, down the narrow glens where the fawn goes to ground, hiding deep in brush until the hound comes racing fast, nosing him out until he lands his kill’. Many of Milton’s metaphors are equally high-flown and extended.
All this creates a sense of excitement as well as grandeur. Similarly, in another trick inherited from the oral performance tradition, epic poems tend to start in media res (in the middle of things), pitching right into the action. Virgil’s Aeneid, for instance, doesn’t begin neatly with Aeneas’s childhood, or even the beginning of the siege of Troy, but with Aeneas already on a boat, fleeing the captured city:
Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expell’d and exil’d, left the Trojan shore.
It’s a technique that’s taken up by pretty much every adventure movie today. Just think of that fast-paced action sequence that kick-starts the movie even before the credits start to roll, before the background is filled in by flashbacks or by fast-forwarding.
The oral heritage is often evident, too, in the dramatic reportage style of the verse, a style that still influences our way of telling a story when we want to create a sense of excitement. There is a hypnotic repeated use of little phrases or epithets, like the ‘wine-dark sea’ in the Odyssey. And there’s a literary technique, for instance, known as parataxis, which is widely used in epic poems. It’s the way sentences are kept short and staccato – without any of the normal linking phrases of other styles of writing – keeping the audience/reader actively engaged, by leaving them to make the connections in their imaginations. Instead of writing, for example, ‘The rain hammered down, making Robin curse under his breath’, the epic might say: ‘The rain hammered down. Robin cursed under his breath.’ It’s a breathless, pointedly dramatic style that’s been so widely adopted for thrillers that it can be a cliché.
Poets rarely attempt epics these days. First of all, the technical challenge is too great for most poets, though Seamus Heaney made a great retelling of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. Secondly, the heightened literary style and high seriousness is something we now find hard to accept. But epic poetry has in the past given Western literature some of its greatest and most inspirational masterpieces, and its shadow lingers on in other forms of literature and art, in serious form in epic novels like Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Melville’s Moby-Dick, and through to the modern pastiche of fantasy and science fiction novels like Lord of the Rings and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (which makes its debt clear in its title) and film adventures like Gladiator.
[1] Scholars distinguish between primary epics, which come directly from the oral tradition, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf and Gilgamesh, and secondary epics, which are sophisticated literary creations in imitation of the original form, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Sometimes, only a vague memory of the story survived orally and the verse was lost. Sometimes, later poets have tried to recreate the epic from mythical fragments, like the eighteenth-century Scot James MacPherson with his tale of Ossian, the legendary Gaelic bard, which MacPherson notoriously tried to pass off as original.
#43 Qi
Qi is either one of the greatest insights into the nature of our lives, or one of the greatest delusions. It is the idea that our lives are sustained by an intangible natural energy or life-force that flows through all things. The word is Chinese and comes originally from the steam wafting off freshly cooked rice. But the concept is linked to the Taoist religion, and similar concepts are found all over the world, such as in the Indian prana and the Western tradition of vitalism.
Chinese legend tells that ideas about qi were originally collected about 4,600 years ago by the Yellow Emperor Huang-di, who is credited with inventing the principles of Chinese medicine. But it emerges most strongly between the fourth and sixth centuries BC in the writings of three key Chinese thinkers: Kong Fuzi (Confucius), Mo Zi and, especially, Laozi.[1]
The concept of qi comes from a fundamentally different way of looking at the world from that of the West. While in the West, everything can be seen as either matter or energy; in traditional Chinese philosophy, things are divided into qi, the life-force or energy, and li, which is pattern or form. The Chinese came to terms with things that had little vitality or form by talking about different levels or fractions of qi, from coarse, heavy solids, through lighter, smoother liquids to the life-breath of living things.
All animals are said to have the life-breath. Even the wind has life-breath. But it is at its most refined in humans. In Chinese thinking, the body consists of Essential Substances or energies, Organ Systems and Channels. Qi or ‘breath’ is one of the essential energies and takes various forms. Yuan-qi is the qi that we are born with, and is fixed throughout our lives. But there are various other qis that vary according to how we live our lives, such as xue-qi, which is the qi of the blood.
We are conceived, apparently, when qi accumulates in the universe, and die when it dissipates. The point in thinking about qi is to learn how to maintain and develop our life-force to achieve long life and spiritual power. It’s all about balance and harmony. Balance depends partly on how you breathe, your sex life and your diet. According to Confucius, this is how a man should manage his xue-qi:
The [morally] noble man guards himself against three things. When he is young, his xue-qi has not yet stabilized, so he guards himself against sexual passion. When he reaches his prime, his xue-qi is not easily subdued, so he guards himself against combativeness. When he reaches old age, his xue-qi is already depleted, so he guards himself against acquisitiveness.
The idea behind acupuncture is that the body’s health depends on the unobstructed flow of qi through the body. Qi flows through the body along twelve meridians, or pathways, each linked to a major organ such as the liver or kidney and also with a body system. The pathways get blocked when there is an imbalance in the body, and the purpose of acupuncture is to unblock the channels and get the qi flowing freely and harmoniously again. The art of feng shui, on the other hand, is about placing things, especially in your home or place of work, to control the flow of qi – using colours, shapes and location to slow it down, accelerate it or redirect it. Martial arts such as qigong are about mastering the flow of qi to achieve extraordinary feats of strength, endurance or agility.
Many Chinese people have followed these principles for thousands of years, and similar ideas have surfaced in the West, as well as in India. The idea of a life-force distinct from the biochemical body is known in the West as vitalism and goes back to the times of Ancient Egypt and
beyond. In the classical notion of the four humours or elements, the vital force was linked to each. When the four humours were banished to the realm of fiction by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many scientists began to look for a scientific basis for a life-force that they believed was essential to maintain living functions. When electricity was discovered in the late eighteenth century, many believed they had found the life-force. Famous chemist Carl Reichenbach (1788–1869) developed the idea of Odic force. In the 1930s, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, originally part of Freud’s circle in Vienna, spent an enormous amount of energy exploring the idea of orgone, a universal life-force linked to the libido.[2]
Vitalism is now thoroughly discredited in the West as, one by one, its possible functions in the body have been explained by more basic biochemical means. ‘Dualism … and Vitalism (the view that living things contain some special physical but equally mysterious stuff – élan vital),’ writes philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Kinds of Minds, ‘have been relegated to the trash heap of history …’
Yet the concept of qi has been slightly harder to binbag. One reason, of course, is that even the most hardline rationalists in the West are wary of trashing oriental tradition for fear of, perhaps entirely valid, accusations of cultural aggression. A second may be the interest in and moderate success of acupuncture.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 5
